Tape printing apparatus are known in for example EP-A-322918 (Brother Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha) and EP-A-267890 (Varitronics). The known tape printing apparatus comprise a cassette receiving bay for receiving a cassette or tape holding case. In EP-A-267890, the tape holding case houses an ink ribbon and a substrate tape, the latter comprising an upper image receiving layer secured to a backing layer by an adhesive. In EP-A-322918, the tape holding case houses an ink ribbon, a transparent image receiving tape and a double-sided adhesive tape which is secured at one of its adhesive coated sides to the image tape after printing and which has a backing layer peelable from its other adhesive coated side. With this tape printing apparatus, the image transfer medium (ink ribbon) and the image receiving tape (substrate) are in the same cassette.
It has also been proposed by the present applicant in, for example EP-A-578372 to house the ink ribbon and the substrate tape in separate cassettes.
In all of these cases, the image receiving tape passes in overlap with an ink ribbon to a printing zone consisting of a print head and a platen which cooperate to cause an image to transfer from the ink ribbon to the image receiving tape. There are many ways in doing this, including dry lettering or dry film impression but the most usual way currently is by thermal printing where the print head is heated and the heat causes ink from the ink ribbon to be transferred to the image receiving tape.
It is also known for the ink ribbon to be omitted and an image to be printed directly on the image receiving tape by heating the print head. This process is called direct thermal printing.
It is known for tape printing apparatus to be connected to a personal computer or PC. With this known arrangement, the user interacts with the PC to design labels. The user interacts with the PC in order to control the printing of labels by the label printer.
Designing labels on a PC is often easier than designing labels on a label printer. This is because the display connected to a PC is very much larger than the display of a label printer. Additionally, the keyboard and mouse arrangement associated with a PC is generally easier to use than the smaller keyboard of a label printer. Accordingly, it is known to design labels on a PC and to download the labels onto a memory card which can then be inserted into a suitable slot in a label printer.
However, the downloading of labels onto a memory card requires the PC to have a suitable memory card slot. Additionally, it is easy for the memory card to be lost or damaged.
It is an aim of some embodiments of the present invention to address or at least mitigate one or more of the problems set out above.